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Tuesday, September 12, 2017

`The Furies Hidden in Themselves'

We
inhabit an age of ambitious virtue. We are no longer content merely to live
decently, leave other people alone and observe the Golden Rule (too anonymous, too
dull, too bourgeois). Goodness means good press. We announce our good
intentions, miss no opportunity to repeat them, and scrupulously police the
failure of others to live up to them. It can be exhausting. Our exemplar is Mrs.
Jellyby, ever mindful of the natives of the Left-Bank-of-the-Borrioboola-Gha
(while her children live in Rousseau-esque squalor). There’s no glory in holding
the door for the old lady.

Edward
Mendelson has published in one volume his two-volume biography now retitled as Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical
Biography (Princeton University Press, 2017). Included are a new preface and postscript, “His Secret Life” (published in The New York Review of Books in 2014 as “The Secret Auden”). The
latter promises scandal but delivers an account of quiet, unambitious virtue.
Mendelson reports that most of the poet’s friends were unaware of his frequent,
unpublicized acts of kindness and charity. Here is his first example:

“Once
at a party I met a woman who attended St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery with him in the
1950s. She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was
suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallways outside
her apartment until she felt safe again.”

Mendelson
learned that a friend of Auden required surgery but couldn’t afford it. The
poet gave him a notebook containing the manuscript of The Age of Anxiety. The friend sold it to the University of Texas
and with the money paid for the surgery. The money he was paid by NBC
Television for translating the libretto of The
Magic Flute Auden gave to Dorothy Day so she could make repairs to a
Catholic Worker homeless shelter threatened with closing by the New York City
Fire Department. Earlier, Auden had given her money to pay the fine.

Mendelson
gives more examples and broadens his examination of Auden’s modesty and distaste
for moral grandstanding and self-congratulation. When he felt obliged to stand
on principle on some literary or moral issue,” Mendelson writes, “he did so
without calling attention to himself, and was impatient with writers like
Robert Lowell whose political protests seemed to him more egocentric than
effective.” I confess that there’s a moral arbiter in me who scratches the name
from the virtue role of anyone who announces his own virtue. I include myself
among the glory-seeking ranks. Years ago, a friend, a sort of down-to-earth moral
instructor, gave me a job: “Do a good turn every day and don’t get found out.”
There’s a part of me that wants you to know what a good fellow I am. Mendelson
places Auden in the context of “an argument about the nature of evil and those
who commit it”:

“On
one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves,
evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force
to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer
to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves
without irony, `I am a good person,’ who perceive great evils only in other,
evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own.
This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured
itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified,
even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive.”

That’s as good a description as I know of our self-righteous
world in 2017. Solzhenitsyn makes the same point in Part I, Chap. 4, “The
Bluecaps,” in The Gulag Archipelago: “If
only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it
were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But
the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”